This series began with an overview of the Outside Resources section of the Professional Portfolio developed by each Teacher Assistant. In the second post, Brock, one of our TAs, shared his Outside Resources entry, and I admitted that I evaluated it incorrectly. The purpose of this, the final post in the series, is to explain what led to my error in evaluation and how the exit interview helped me to correct my misconception.

The previous post introduced the assessment used to evaluate Teacher Assistants' ability to supplement their curriculum with outside resources. Typically, this entry includes an NCTM article related to the content addressed in a TA's unit plan. Issues only arise when TAs select resources that are either unrelated to the mathematics in the unit or are not from NCTM.

I woke this morning and found this tweet from Alfie Kohn in my Twitter Stream:

"The writer's [teacher's] job is not to judge, but to understand." Ernest Hemingway

Assessment and evaluation are often used interchangeably, but the framework that I use when thinking about the Teaching-Learning Cycle sees them as two separate phases. Assessment is data gathering. Evaluation is analysis of data.